Prof hastily replied, ‘No. I haven’t learnt from your rubbish! Give my people what they deserve. I am the one who was made to change their lives.’
‘Which people? The ones that have forgotten you? Do you know the price of garri in the market? Why would they think of you when you can’t solve the rising price of rice?’ The head of state laughed like a jackal and walked away. Two of his entourage of soldiers who were ready to act on the president’s behalf were about to leap on him—one had in fact already planted a slap on his face—but the head of state shouted, ‘No! No! Leave him. Be kind to his skin,’ and he walked away without a backward glance.
For many weeks after that visit nothing happened, until one of the soldiers deployed to monitor him, alongside the prison warders, “caught” him reading a page from an old newspaper used for wrapping balls of akara that the warders had eaten. He had found the paper on the floor on one of those mornings when he was outside for the usual grass cutting duties with other prisoners sentenced to life imprisonment. He had scavenged reading material in the past and no one ever countered him for that. On this particular day, when his agony was to begin, the soldier caught him and made him realise he committed a “sin” for picking up an oil-soaked newspaper, oozing of the residue from a clod of akara, to read. The soldiers, drunk, it seemed, with the power the regime fed them, ran towards Prof from the spot behind where they had been observing him.
‘You want us to lose our job?! Provezor Idiot! Provezor Enemy-of-progress! Kai! Provezor Stupid! Bloody civilian! Officer! Officer! Come. Come now and see what this bastard is reading. Paper! Shege. Sabotage inside prison. Ode! He is reading paper!’ The soldier, the type that can be described as beer bottle shaped, rushed at him and kicked him in the groin with his boot. As Prof bent over in pain, clutching himself, the little boldness in him made him challenge them.
‘What have I done?’
‘Shut up, you! Bloody civilian! You think you have sense, ko?’
At first, he felt he could talk his way through and had in fact, begun throwing invectives at the soldier.
‘Mr. Man? Be careful what you do to me. I was just…’
He didn’t finish the sentence because a round object landed on his jaw, sending two teeth flying from his mouth. His moue dissolved from a cackle into a pang of feverish tears. Between his cries, he noticed that standing next to the beer bottle soldier was a rockier soldier whose face had scars of all sorts. He didn’t do much talking but hit Prof continuously with the butt of his gun, like he was pounding seeds. It was an understanding of being sprawled on the floor, with two soldiers over him, and the warders watching the “cinema”, and laughing, that made him change his arrogance to loud pleas of ‘I beg you, sir! In the name of God, the Creator of heaven and earth. Forgive me. Forgive my insolence. Never again.’
It was too late. The men’s displeasure had risen to their eyes and their anger was now flowing through their nerves, with their necks tightly stretched. They dragged him from his single cell, where he had books to write in, and placed him in a cell of ten people. He was chained together with the other men, so that at night when one of them wanted to turn, he would tap the man next to him and that man tapped the next… and when they were all fully alert to reposition themselves, an adjustment could be made. On those nights, he rarely slept. Two days later, before he was again taken away from the cell, a boy, who was already showing signs of dementia, died. They only took his body away four days later. Prof was later taken to another cell, where a sympathetic warder told him that the soldiers harboured a peaked hatred towards him for his insolence to their boss.
The next confinement that the beer bottle soldier took him to one morning, was a six-foot square room with no windows. In the evening, he came and removed the bulb in the cell, leaving him in the dark. That day, alone, he cried himself to sleep. He felt some peace.
And when the soldiers came in the next day, they replaced the bulb and the cell was lit. The two soldiers walked into his cell with different objects—wire, an iron bucket, a boiling ring, and an amber-coloured gas lamp, or sometimes, a fluorescent lamp, and other things he couldn’t identify. What pained him the most was that he could never remember the way the soldiers looked, other than their shapes. Their faces remained unknown. Each time the lights in his cell came on, his pulse raced in readiness for the horror that was about to begin. On most days, the soldiers first put him in a stress position, where they forced him to kneel down, shackled his hands to the ground and made him lean back with a slant, for a day and a half. Sometimes, they told him to squat on the ground, making sure he stood on the balls of his feet, with his hands behind his back. If he lost his balance, he got a big slap to the back of his head. The torture methods always differed.
‘I am happy today, okay?’ the soldier in charge of him for the day would say. Most times, they came reeking of burukutu, so the alcohol always ran into their words and their actions to correct him seemed doubled. Once, they used a hot pressing-iron on him. On the days when they weren’t too high, some sense of humanity crept into them as they would at least flog him without first pricking his skin with needles. Still, whenever those lights came on, his heart beat hard against his chest, like it was about to jump out. The sweat ran down his body, reaching into the corners of his groin. It was in those days that he swore against lights.
29
She was sleeping. She found herself again in a chair in his room, only this time with the added sensation that accompanied the meeting of her skin and that of Prof’s. In her dream, life began to have a pattern and she became comfortable with using the first-person pronoun for him in Yoruba. The awe with which she held him, career and age wise, dissolved into moments of passionate kisses and arresting stares, which had them giggling like teenagers later on. Soon, she became more confident and she started to call him by his first name, Eni. She stopped feeling a small lump in her throat when she did; but because she still respected his past and their considerable age difference, she whispered Eni, with a fondness that unfurled an ache in her voice each time she did. Sometimes, she would whisper, ‘Prof,’ to herself, caring less about those around her. She woke up.
Her first urge was to see Ireti. It came strongly at her, like never before, and she stood up from the bed and went to the bus stop to go in search of him that afternoon. She knew he would not be in school because of the ongoing university lecturers’ strike so she went to his house. The house was different when she got there. The co-tenants looked through her and this amplified her being a stranger in their space. She knocked on his door, remarking that the campaign poster which she had noticed on her first visit was half-torn, and elbowing it out of its former position was another poster for a concert featuring the Plantashun Boiz. She pushed the door slightly and it swung open. His friends were in the room, gathered over a bowl of rice, shirtless and laughing, until she opened the door. They were the same boys who had spied on her, laughed with—and at—her on her first visit, and now as she peered into the room, they all looked away like they had never met her.
She asked questions like someone who was trying to find the directions to a toilet in a crowded hall while trying to hide how pressed they were. They didn’t even wear a smirk, they looked at her with straight faces and answered her in monosyllables until she realised there was no way for her to get anything from them, except what they wanted to let her know: he had moved from the house. She had gone to the student union office on campus a few times but he was either not around or always too busy to see her. Ireti who appeared to be present everywhere all the time, was suddenly nowhere to be found, and she could not understand why.
‘Please tell him I came.’
‘Okay, we will. Shut the door on your way out, to keep our sanity.’
She felt a weakness in her legs and even though she knew he might not have meant it in the literal sense, she felt he had communicated to her what she feared, that he suspected she had some connection to Prof.
When Desire got ho
me, she rolled back and forth and sideways on her bed. She thought of Ireti and considered going to tell Prof that he had disappeared and he no longer needed to worry about paternity, but this would mean returning to him. She thought of how she had sat on his stairway and wept. She waited and hoped he would fling the door open, running and shouting into the streets, ‘Desire! Desire! Wait, wait, I am sorry!’ She inhaled a gulp of air knowing how fickle imagination could be.
When she left him, she had wanted so much to believe that she had misread his intent and she was being taught a valid lesson on resilience. And then when she got home, she prayed he would come to her flat the next day to find her and apologise. Her hope evaporated when she remembered that she had never told him which block she lived in.
How could she explain her return? ‘I have come because I want to give you my address, you know, in case—’ She wiped her face with her hands and shook her head. It was one thing that would not come to pass. She wondered if he would pull her close and draw a line on her skin with his finger, as they sat together in the room. She pictured herself saying to him on one such occasion, ‘What would people think?’
‘Which people would think of us—the ones that know or the ones that don’t?’
‘What about Ireti?’ she asked.
‘What about him?’
Desire pictured herself laughing like she had not done in a long time, throwing herself into the air, leaving her weight to fall into his arms as he spoke.
The world built in her imagination, however, collapsed as a mosquito hummed in her ear. She tried to catch the insect, slapping the air.
She saw herself on Prof’s stairs once again. She thought of it as the place where her dreams became even more vivid. Desire wanted to run through the door and down to his door, banging on it until he came out to see her. She wanted him to open the door and then she would fall into his arms begging for help from the dark room of torture; all she needed was access to his home. She considered asking him, ‘Aren’t you satisfied with being in darkness now? What is the point of a light that does not shine?’ She wanted him to say he was sorry, and she would fall on his chest, and they would cry together. But more than anything, she felt she needed to run away to a place where she would not be reminded of him, or even Ireti, or anything in her life. How easy would it be to forget, was there really something called forgetting? Somewhere she did not feel like she knew the both of them—and did not care either.
30
Desire slept and woke up in the wee hours of Sunday to the frenzied screams of ‘Alleluya’ and dissenting voices following the shout with a gospel song. Church service at one of her neighbours’ started in the middle of the night, unlike other churches. He once told her he believed in the teachings of the Seventh-day Adventists, that church day is Saturday, but also felt some validity to his being raised a Sunday church boy, so he decided to hold masses in between—and these fell in the middle of the nights.
Papa, as he was popularly known in the estate, had turned his flat into a church where he held a vigil every night. Anyone who complained of noise was cursed and accused of being a demon and an agent of darkness sent to destroy the good work of the Lord. Other than the church noise, he was a good guy who remembered to sweep beyond his vicinity and would go downstairs to clear the open drain weekly without being asked. Sometimes, he offered to pay electricity bills for those who could not immediately afford to. These were some of the reasons people forgave him and took his point that all he did was cast out generational curses from his family, and they were invited to remove theirs too. His Christian ministry was to fight demons. They were so used to it that whenever there wasn’t a service, one could hear people asking him the next morning, ‘Pastor, is everything okay?’
She felt like going to his room to see the curses walk away from the prayerful people. Perhaps he could reveal whether there was some supernatural curse hindering her.
‘Die! Die! Die! Fall down and dieeeeee!’ Then a bumble of humming would start and a song ascended to ignite the fire that Papa called to consume the curses on his generation and those of the inhabitants.
‘Fireeee connn-ssssume them. You, curse of stagnancy!’ he shouted and his family and other congregants responded, ‘Dieeee! Die. Die. Fall down and dieeeeee.’
As the noise persisted, Desire continued to turn on her bed until her sides ached. She remained supine, counting her fingers until she became tired. She turned towards Remilekun who looked doped in sleep. After a futile attempt at trying to sleep, she left her thoughts to circle around Prof. She desperately wished to think of something else. She tried to think of how the ongoing strike would keep her years longer in school. She thought of her late mother, of Remilekun’s sisterliness, of Babangida, and her mind just assumed a blur, like one getting out of a hangover. Her throat burned. She jumped from her bed and walked towards the cupboard where the utensils were stored. A jar filled with water was on it.
‘You okay?’ Remilekun asked with a yawn.
‘Yep,’ she whispered before she poured some water into a cup and gulped it down in one breath.
She had not expected Remilekun to be awake, since she always slept through Pastor’s noise and whenever Desire mentioned how it kept her awake, her roommate joked that she was still weak from going to Prof’s house for the thing.
And then Desire would ask, ‘What thing?’
‘The thing you always go and collect at 9pm,’ Remilekun replied.
Desire felt Remilekun regarding her for some time, but when she turned to tell her to go back to sleep, she was already in a deep slumber. Unlike Remilekun, who slept so easily and wouldn’t stir in any noise, Desire always found it difficult to sleep. As she lay on the bed, she placed her hand on her navel and stroked the umbilical tip. There was no place to hurry to that morning.
‘You’re thinking of that Prof man, right?’ Remilekun said in a sleep-laced voice, surprising her.
‘I thought you were asleep?’ Desire took a deep breath and returned to answer her question. ‘Not exactly,’ she started to say and then she changed her mind to confide, ‘If I had not condoned visiting him in the darkness, would anything have changed?’
‘Are you trying to say, would you guys have fucked?’
‘Can you try to think straight for once? Life between a man and a woman is not all about physical attraction,’ she said.
‘Hear yourself,’ Remilekun said and then took a turn to mimic her, animating her words in a funny voice, ‘A search for the soul! What is that?’
‘I needed to contact my past.’
‘Ha! Why are you talking like this? Contact your past? So, because it is the past, it is best seen in the dark?’
‘No, it is in lit souls.’
Remilekun became silent and then she screeched, ‘Egbami ke! God, someone help me make sense of this girl’s madness! I should have known-o! You were normal before you started seeing this prison madman-o. Or I thought you were. This guy has turned your head upside down. See what nonsense you’re saying. Soul! Light! Dark? Past? What is all this nonsense talk?’
Remilekun jumped down from her bed and paced about the room.
‘I am now truly concerned.’
Desire noticed her voice shook as she spoke.
‘I am fine. I really am,’ Desire said, with her gaze on the ceiling, noticing a cobweb on the farthest corner, the insect trapped in it not struggling. She counted her fingers. Her mother used to tell her to do that when she couldn’t sleep at night, back then in Maroko. And then, she leapt up from the bed as she thought of how much she wanted to talk to him, but on her own terms. She walked towards the door and clicked the lock.
‘Madam, where to?’ Remilekun’s voice stopped her.
‘I-I-I, I just want to take a walk.’
‘A walk?’ Remilekun jumped down from her bed and walked towards the door. She flicked the switch on; power was back. ‘Can you see what the time says?’ Remilekun pointed to the wall clock. ‘Well, if you don’t know how to
read the clock any more, here is what it says, 3.45am.’ Remilekun stopped talking and they locked eyes. Desire bowed her head and placed her hands over her mouth. ‘Now, I am convinced you are not okay. I am so convinced. I don’t know what is happening to you-o. I don’t know,’ Remilekun’s voice still shook as she spoke to her.
‘My head is full. I need to take a stroll. Now.’ Desire leaned against the wall and avoided looking at Remilekun.
‘You need to go to your bed and sleep. Now! You want to go to nutty-professor’s house, huh? For the sake of your dead mother, please, Desire, leave that man alone. He is mad. Everybody knows it, why don’t you accept it? You have been acting strange—too strange,’ Remilekun leaned against the door and exclaimed in successive spurts, ‘Oh! Why did I even mention that he moved into our area? What is it about him, anyway? Are you people… is there something you are not telling me? Is it a cult thing?’ Then she decided against what she intended to say, and sighed, ‘Don’t do what you will regret. I am afraid. That man is mad, and there’s something else about him. I know—or why else are you acting this way?’ She paused to swallow before continuing, ‘You are sane. Remain so,’ Remilekun’s voice was softer this time as she spoke. For the first time, it dawned on Desire that she was losing control of herself. She closed her eyes, placed her back against the door and slipped to the ground shaking, and Remilekun covered her with her pestle-like arms, stroking her hair. In Remilekun’s embrace, they cried together.
A Small Silence Page 20